Ford Gives Advice to Barack Obama

Increasingly, right wingers show they haven't learned a thing in the last couple of years. After more than two decades successfully defining politics in our country, Americans simply aren't buying Republican fictions like they once did. This time it was Insight Magazine (a Rev. Moon enterprise) and Fox News (a Rupert Murdoch enterprise) who tried to smear Barack Obama with a ridiculous story about his childhood education, but it didn't work.

Barack Obama is made of strong stuff but recent candidate Harold Ford has some advice for the senator from Illinois; here's the story from AP reporter Nedra Pickler in The Washington Post:

Former Rep. Harold Ford Jr., has some advice for his friend Sen. Barack Obama: Don't be afraid to take your presidential campaign anywhere in this country, no matter what the racial politics.

Ford lost a close bid last fall to become the first black senator from a Southern state since Reconstruction. Some blamed the loss in Tennessee on racial politics, but Ford said Thursday other factors, including a rival who spent his own money, contributed to his defeat.

He said Obama, son of a white mother and an African father, can't control how his race will affect his candidacy.

"As long as he works hard, is honest ... and is not afraid to take his message anywhere in the country, he'll do fine," Ford said.

Pickler also mentions that Steven Spielberg and others are holding a fundraiser for Obama next month. I like Spielberg and of course all the candidates are going to have these big fundraisers but let's hope the American people are paying attention in 2008 and that they select the best candidate and not the candidate with the most money like they did with George W. Bush. And I mean both the general election and the primaries. In any case, Barack Obama clearly is among the top four or five presidential hopefuls on both sides of the aisle and would be a vast improvement over the last six years.